How to choose a signature scent

A signature scent is the fragrance people come to think of as yours: the one they notice on a scarf you lent them, or on the stairs after you have gone. Learning how to choose a signature scent is less about finding the most beautiful bottle than about finding the one that suits the life it will be worn in. It is chosen the way a good coat is chosen: slowly, in the right light and tried on more than once.

Here is how we would go about it.

Do you need a signature scent at all?

Not necessarily. Some people keep a wardrobe of fragrances and change them with the weather, the season or the evening, and there is nothing wrong with that. Others prefer one fragrance worn so consistently that it becomes part of them, the way a particular tweed or a particular watch does.

The two are not really opposed. Many people with a signature still keep a lighter fragrance for high summer, or something warmer for winter evenings. A signature is simply the one you return to without thinking.

Start with your days, not the bottle

Before you smell anything, think about where it will be worn. A fragrance that is lovely at a candlelit dinner may be too much in a small office at nine in the morning, and one made for a summer river may feel thin in a Yorkshire January.

A few questions help:

• Where do you spend your hours? Out of doors, at a desk, in a kitchen, in the car.
• When do you notice smell most? First thing, or in the evening.
• What do you wear? Linen and cotton, or wool and waxed jackets. Cloth holds fragrance, and some fragrances suit some cloths better.
• How would you like to be remembered? Fresh and easy, warm and close or quietly composed.

These are, more or less, the four questions our Consultation asks: a room, an hour, a cloth and how you would like to be remembered. It suggests two of our fragrances and says why. It is a starting point, not a verdict, but it saves smelling everything at once.

How to choose a signature scent in practice

Test on skin, not on paper

Paper strips are useful for narrowing a field, but at a counter they are smelled in the first minute, which shows you the opening, the brightest and quickest notes, but not much of what follows. The character of a fragrance is in the heart and the base, and those you only meet on skin, over hours. If the words top, heart and base are unfamiliar, we set them out in Perfume notes explained.

When you do spray, wait a minute before smelling. The first breath is mostly alcohol, and it tells you nothing.

Give each one a whole day

Wear one fragrance at a time, for the whole of a day. Notice it in the morning, again after lunch and again in the evening. Notice whether you still like it at six o’clock, and whether you missed it the next day. It is slow, and it is the only method we trust.

That is why our Discovery Set holds all six of our eaux de parfum in 2 ml atomisers, with the suggestion that you wear one each day for a week. It opens with our first pre-orders at £38, delivered free in the UK, and the full cost is credited against a first full bottle or The Pair.

Smell only a few at a time

Noses tire. After a handful of strong smells, everything starts to blur. Shops often offer a dish of coffee beans to “reset” the nose, but when the psychologist Alexis Grosofsky and colleagues tested the idea in 2011, students picked out a new perfume no more reliably after sniffing coffee beans than after sniffing plain air or a slice of lemon; the differences were not statistically significant. The scent scientist Avery Gilbert wrote the study up on First Nerve. Fresh air and a little time do as well. Three fragrances in an afternoon is plenty.

Try it in the weather you will wear it in

Warmth makes a fragrance evaporate faster and project further, and cold holds it closer. A composition chosen in a heated shop in December may behave quite differently on a July afternoon. If a fragrance is for every season, try to wear it in more than one before deciding.

Ask someone who stands close

You will notice your own fragrance less as the day goes on, simply because the nose adjusts to a steady smell. The person beside you will not. Ask a partner or a friend what they smell, and whether it is too much. That is the only audience a fragrance really needs.

Why it may smell different on you

People often say a fragrance “changes with your skin”. Skin, warmth and what you put on it before the fragrance can all affect how it develops, though firm evidence on exactly how much is thinner than the confident claims suggest. Some of the difference is in the nose rather than the skin. People vary in how strongly they smell particular materials, and some cannot smell certain musks at all; a 2022 study in PLoS Genetics linked one such gap to a single smell receptor. So a friend’s favourite may simply not be yours, and that is no failure on either side.

Signs you have found it

• You reach for it without deciding to.
• You still like it at the end of a long day.
• Nobody has remarked that it is strong, but someone has asked what it is.
• It feels like you on an ordinary Tuesday, not only on an occasion.

The last is the real test. A signature is worn on ordinary days. We call Racing Green the house signature for the same reason: it is meant for cool mornings and steady habits rather than for being noticed.

Keeping it yours

Once you have found it, wear it lightly and keep it well. Two sprays in the right place will do more for it than five in the wrong one, as we set out in How to make perfume last longer. And keep the bottle cool and dark, so it smells next year as it does today.

If you would like a starting point, take The Consultation. Four questions, two suggestions and no hurry at all.